Water is essential for all dimensions of
life. Over the past few decades, use of water has increased, and in many places
water availability is falling to crisis levels. More than eighty countries, with forty
percent of the worlds population, are already facing water shortages, while by year
2020 the worlds population will double. The costs of water infrastructure have risen
dramatically. The quality of water in rivers and underground has deteriorated, due to
pollution by waste and contaminants from cities, industry and agriculture. Ecosystems are
being destroyed, sometimes permanently. Over one billion people lack safe water, and three
billion lack sanitation; eighty per cent of infectious diseases are waterborne, killing
millions of children each year. (more...)

World Bank Institue
WATER POLICY REFORM PROGRAM - Nov. 1999

Water is the best of all things.

PINDAR (C. 522-C. 438 B.C.), Olympian Odes

Water has become a highly precious resource. There are some
places where a barrel of water costs more than a barrel of oil.

Lloyd Axworthy, Foreign Minister of Canada (1999 - News Conference)

More than one-half of the world's major rivers are being
seriously depleted and polluted, degrading and poisoning the surrounding ecosystems, thus
threatening the health and livelihood of people who depend upon them for irrigation,
drinking and industrial water

Ismail Serageldin, Chairman of the World Commission on Water for the 21st Century-
Water Forum, Netherlands, November 30, 1999

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.

LORAN EISELY, The Immense Journey, 1957

All the water that will ever be is, right now.

National Geographic, October 1993

If you gave me several million years, there would be nothing that
did not grow in beauty if it were surrounded by water.

JAN ERIK VOLD, What All The World Knows, 1970

Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a
third thing, that makes water and nobody knows what that is.

D.H. LAWRENCE (1885-1930), Pansies, 1929

Water has no taste, no color, no odor; it cannot be defined, art
relished while ever mysterious. Not necessary to life, but rather life itself. It fills us
with a gratification that exceeds the delight of the senses.

ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY (1900-1944), Wind, Sand, and Stars, 1939

Water is the one substance from which the earth can conceal
nothing; it sucks out its innermost secrets and brings them to our very lips.

JEAN GIRAUDOUX (1882-1944), The Madwomen of Chaillot, 1946

When the well is dry, we know the worth of water.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, (1706-1790), Poor Richard's Almanac, 1746

The crisis of our diminishing water resources is just as severe
(if less obviously immediate) as any wartime crisis we have ever faced. Our survival is
just as much at stake as it was at the time of Pearl Harbor, or the Argonne, or
Gettysburg, or Saratoga

JIM WRIGHT, U.S. Representative, The Coming Water Famine, 1966

High quality water is more than the dream of the
conservationists, more than a political slogan; high quality water, in the right quantity
at the right place at the right time, is essential to health, recreation, and economic
growth.

EDMUND S. MUSKIE, U.S. Senator, speech, 1 March 1966

Children of a culture born in a water-rich environment, we have
never really learned how important water is to us. We understand it, but we do not respect
it.

WILLIAM ASHWORTH, Nor Any Drop to Drink, 1982

Of all our planet's activities--geological movements, the
reproduction and decay of biota, and even the disruptive propensities of certain species
(elephants and humans come to mind)--no force is greater than the hydrologic cycle.

RICHARD BANGS and CHRISTIAN KALLEN, Rivergods, 1985

Between earth and earth's atmosphere, the amount of water remains
constant; there is never a drop more, never a drop less. This is a story of circular
infinity, of a planet birthing itself.

LINDA HOGAN, Northern Lights, Autumn 1990

Filthy water cannot be washed.

WEST AFRICAN PROVERB

If you could tomorrow morning make water clean in the world, you
would have done, in one fell swoop, the best thing you could have done for improving human
health by improving environmental quality.

WILLIAM C. CLARK, speech, Racine, Wisconsin, April 1988

In every glass of water we drink, some of the water has already
passed through fishes, trees, bacteria, worms in the soil, and many other organisms,
including people...Living systems cleanse water and make it fit, among other things, for
human consumption.

ELLIOT A. NORSE, in R.J. Hoage, ed., Animal Extinctions, 1985

[Chesapeake Bay is] an immense outdoor protein factory.

H.L. MENCKEN (1880-1956), Happy Days, 1940

Estuaries are a happy land, rich in the continent itself, stirred
by the forces of nature like the soup of a French chef; the home of myriad forms of life
from bacteria and protozoan to grasses and mammals; the nursery, resting place, and refuge
of countless.

STANELY A. CAIN, speech, 1966

Many estuaries produce more harvestable human food per acre than
the best midwestern farmland.

STANELY A. CAIN, testimony, U.S. House of Representatives,
Merchant Marine and Fisheries subcommittee, March 1967

The estuary is the point where man, the sea--his immemorial ally
and adversary-and the land meet and challenge each other.

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR, National Estuarine Pollution
Study, November 1969

Life originated in the sea, and about eighty percent of it is
still there.

The oceans are the planet's last great living wilderness, man's
only remaining frontier on earth, and perhaps his last chance to produce himself a
rational species.

JOHN L. CULLNEY, Wilderness Conservation, September- October 1990

The marsh, to him who enters it in a receptive mood, holds,
besides mosquitoes and stagnation, melody, the mystery of unknown waters, and the
sweetness of Nature undisturbed by man.

CHARLES WILLIAM BEEBE (1877-1962), Log of the Sun, 1906

Only those people that have directly experienced the wetlands
that line the shore...can appreciate their mystic qualities. The beauty of rising mists at
dusk, the ebb and flow of the tides, the merging of fresh and salt waters....